Mary:
This issue of Authoritti5.0 is all about podcasting, and I couldn’t think of a better person to interview than you, Hala. You are the queen of everything to do with podcasting. Before we dive into the real questions, let’s start with your story. Why did you start podcasting and even wrap an entire business model around it?
Hala:
I started my career in radio. I got an internship at Hot 97 when I was 19 years old at the world’s number one hip hop station. I worked for Angie Martinez, who was the Voice of New York at the time and had one of the biggest radio shows. I got three years of experience while I was at the station. I used to have online radio shows; I would interview music artists. And I had many different online radio shows throughout my twenties. I even had this blog site called the Sorority of Hip Hop, with 50 bloggers under me. We also had radio shows, and we almost got a show on MTV. We filmed an entire summer, but unfortunately MTV pulled the plug. At that point, I really thought my career was over, that I would never get back on a mic. I didn’t get the Hot 97 gig that I really worked hard for; I didn’t get MTV. So, I went to corporate. I said, ”I’m going to just be normal person.” Four years later, I ended up starting the Young & Profiting podcast. And here we are today: Number one of education podcasts across all apps.
Mary:
Hala, the podcast industry is growing at a rapid pace and shows no sign of slowing down either. New podcasts are being released on a daily basis and well-established podcasts are growing their audience base. People listen to podcasts more often as new content becomes available. Does this level of growth present new opportunities for brands and businesses as well?
Hala:
Yes. 100%. Podcasting is a great way to monetize your business, and there are many different ways to do that. It’s not only about getting sponsorships and ad opportunities; it’s
also a lead-generation tool. The first way that I monetized my podcast was through my guests. I have a marketing and podcasts agency, and my guests would come on my show. Those are the types of people that want my services. I interview authors, I interview CEOs, and celebrities, and those are my perfect client. I always kept getting the same question about who does my marketing, and I just decided one day to monetize the demand. People love what I’m doing to market my podcasts. They want the same thing. I started offering services, and I realized that is a very early stage way to monetize your podcast. So before I had the downloads, before I had the sponsors, I was monetizing my podcast through my guests.
Mary:
So then that leads me to another question about who should start a podcast. Are there any prerequisites to doing that?
Hala:
No. I think that there’s a low barrier to entry. If you want to meet new people, if you want to talk to people you would otherwise not be able to reach out
to, starting a podcast is a great idea. Also if you want to learn and you love to learn, starting a podcast is a great idea because either way, whether you have 20,000 listeners or 12 listeners, you’ll learn, you’ll grow your network. You’ll be more polished. You’ll be a better public speaker. You’ll be a better thinker. You’ll be a better writer.
Mary:
The other thing is, Hala, it also teaches you how to ask the right questions, not just on a podcast but in any interview. Even if you’re on a panel discussion with your client on a strategy call, I think it helps you understand how to ask the right questions through the lens of your audience. I have found that it’s really helped me with that. So let’s break down the anatomy of a brilliant podcast. You’ve been doing this for a long time and not just podcasts, but media overall. What would you say are the key attributes to a brilliant podcast?
Hala:
Well, first of all, you want to make sure that your title is catchy. Everybody’s show format is different; some people have storytelling podcasts, some people have interview podcasts. So let’s say you’re an interview podcast like so many are. You want to make sure that you start off with some sort of a hook, a teaser, something that brings people in right in the beginning so they don’t turn it off. Make sure that you introduce your reason for your show, your mission for your show, your purpose. Then you want to go into your episode intro. What are you going to talk about in this show? Go through the interview, but you know what? There’s no perfect recipe or format, so it’s hard to say what the exact recipe is. But the key is you want to keep people engaged. So whether you’re inserting little segments, whether you’re even breaking it up with commercials, sometimes that can be entertaining for the listeners. Believe it or not, they like listening to commercials. So I’m just keeping it fresh and trying to stand out.
Mary:
You just mentioned something very important, the commercials in a podcast. I think people who are podcast listeners are more tolerant about commercials and ad breaks in the actual podcast than being tolerant watching commercials on TV. I don’t watch TV. And quite frankly, I can’t stand ads, but on a podcast I can tolerate them. Why is that? I mean, have you found that with your audience as well?
Hala:
The thing is that people are really connected to the host voice and especially in an interview show, the commercials are stories. Most of the time I’m talking about my experience with the product or ad. And as a listener, you probably really like me as a person and want to hear my stories and want to hear my opinions on things. So it’s almost a way to get to know the host a little bit better. And that’s why the host-read ads do so well. If it was just a commercial playing, you’d be like, ”Oh, this is some sponsored thing,” but when it’s the host, it’s like they’re talking to you and you feel very engaged.
Mary:
So it’s contextual, sort of like a part of the formula. We’ve seen the rise of YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn influencers, most of whom are famous for being famous.
Personally I think the future of real influencers is specialists who are experts in their subject matter. I think we’ll see a rise of these types of influencers who can genuinely bring immense value to the world. Does this mean we’re now going to see the rise of podcast influencers? Would you say that podcast influencers are different from social media influencers?
Hala:
You know, that’s a really great question. There are actually a lot of podcasters who have no social media presence, a lot of very famous podcasters who don’t even try to build their following on social or some who barely even keep up. They just post the same thing over and over, the same type of template, and they don’t even give it much effort. So there are different types of podcasts and influencers, and there are folks like me who have both. I’m a podcast influencer, and I have a social channel. What I will say is that just because you’re a social media star doesn’t mean you’re going to have a popular podcast. There are a lot of celebrities and influencers who try to start a podcast that doesn’t take off. So you don’t need to be a celebrity to do well in podcasting. It’s really all about your content.
And also your angle, like how you
stood out, what you do differently. How did you title it? What were your keywords that made it enticing? It’s not just about who is hosting the podcast.
Mary:
Hala, what was your driver when you started your podcast? Because you’re very specific on your subject matter, but what was the driver behind that podcast for you?
Hala:
I really wanted to help people live better. I really wanted to help people grow personally, professionally, and financially in their lives. I wanted to give back. I was a failed entrepreneur right out of college. Then I went into corporate, and I got promoted a million times. And I started making my first six figures, and I felt like I had to give back and teach other young people how they could make money, too, and avoid the mistakes that I made. I wanted to help them gain more influence, help them better manage their time, help them get better sleep – anything that would help them improve their life. And when I first started my podcast, I had no intention of monetizing it. It was purely something I wanted to do to be of service. My whole reason for starting on LinkedIn was to push my
podcast and give this information out to the world. People really aligned with that mission early on, so much so that by my second episode, I had my first volunteer. By my eighth episode, I had 10 volunteers in the Slack channel who just wanted to help me push and build my show. One man from Estonia was building my websites. One guy from Atlanta was doing my videos. I had Tim, who’s doing LinkedIn automation and doing my DMS and graphics, and everybody just wanted to support this mission. They all just wanted to help me!
Mary:
You and I have the same philosophy, Hala. I believe that if we bring value, it’s not about how much am I going to make, or how many followers will I get, or how many listeners or downloads will I get. If you push the transaction to the side and you really focus on solving a problem in the world by giving a lot of little bite-size content pieces, people can consume the content and do something with it. I don’t need to charge for that. I just really want to be able to see people thrive. And because my driver is success, there are a lot of people that don’t understand that concept. I think that is why driving your mission is now becoming your legacy. But on the other side of that, you’ve built this multimillion-dollar business around it. You know, it’s not brain surgery to figure out that’s the formula to success. Do you find yourself saying this over and over again to people?
Hala:
Yes. 100%. When you give, you always get something in return, even when you’re just getting a mentor. My strategy for getting mentors is being of service, doing things for free, and helping them out. One day they may help me out and turn around and pull me up if they can. It’s all about giving and giving. When you give, you get so much in return.
Mary:
Absolutely. So let’s talk about commercialization of a podcast. I think a lot of people want to start a podcast, as we said before, as part of their marketing strategy, but the effort versus the ROI sometimes doesn’t stack up.
Obviously patience is a key as well as being clear about your target audience and your subject matter. But the question people have is ”How do I commercialize a podcast?”
Hala:
So there are multiple ways. We talked about one in the beginning, which was lead generation and using your guests as a way to build clientele for your business.
Another way is to get sponsors. Once you reach a certain number of downloads, you are available for sponsors. So 10,000 downloads per episode is a good number to hit if you want to be enticing to sponsors. And there are many different ad agencies you can work with. There are platforms online that you can basically apply to, and they will then connect you with brands and get you commercials. Now, the way that it works, it’s a certain amount of money per 1000 downloads. That’s called CPM. So it can be anywhere from $15 to $45 per CPM.
So you could make $700 a commercial, and you can stack commercials in a podcast. Let’s say you have three commercials in your podcasts. You can make $2,100. And if you have two episodes a week, you could make $4,200 in that week. Doing that every month, you can make a decent amount of money if you have a small team, right? So that’s how you basically monetize a podcast. If you have a website, an email list, or social media accounts, you can basically do a direct sponsorship with brands where they sponsor your social. You might send an email for them. You might have a podcast commercial, and then you can charge a flat rate. There’s also affiliate marketing, which are partnerships. For example, you can sign up to be an affiliate partner with audible Fiverr, and then you can make a percentage of whatever you sell with your podcast commercials.
Mary:
What is the best way to promote your podcast?
Hala:
The best way to promote your podcast is in the apps themselves. Forty percent of people who are going to find your podcasts are going to find them on the podcast listener apps themselves like Apple CastBox or Spotify. They’re already listening to podcasts. The average person is subscribed to seven podcasts. So if you want to make sure that you’re visible in those apps, one way is to guest on other podcasts. If you’re guesting on a podcast, the listener may be listening to seven others. That means that maybe they’ll listen to your podcast. So everybody tuning in right now, maybe they’re going to go check out Young & Profiting podcasts. That’s my goal as a podcast or guest on other shows.
The other ways you can do commercials on other podcasts is to sign up to the same apps and platforms to advertise your show on other podcasts.
You can also reach out to the apps and see if they have in-app features like banners or featured podcasts. You can get featured in their blogs, in their social media. There are a lot of apps out there outside of Apple, 70 or so different apps that distribute podcasts on IAB-certified platforms. You can basically get in touch with them and see if they have advertising opportunities to be featured in their apps or collaboration opportunities. That’s one of the main ways that I grew my show. When I first had a
LinkedIn following, I had about 12,000 followers. When I had about 60,000 followers, I reached out to CastBox, to Stitcher, and to Podcast Republic and all these different apps outside of Apple. And I said, ”Hey, I’ll do a contest for you. I’ll do an educational post for you on LinkedIn, in exchange for you featuring me in your app.” So in addition to writing a blog about me, putting a banner up about my podcast, and enticing people to subscribe, some of these apps even incorporate me in their onboarding flow. So basically when people sign up, it’s pre-checked, and they’re auto subscribed to my podcasts.
That’s how my show just blew up in maybe four or five months of me collaborating with all these different apps. And then I got on the cover of Podcast magazine, and my show went from about 4,000 downloads in a month to about $15,000 in a day.
Mary:
Let me flip the switch now on the other side for people who want to be interviewed as a guest on podcasts. Everyone wants to be interviewed by top podcast hosts, and it’s not easy to get on the top So what is the best way to be seen and heard by those podcast hosts?
Hala:
Some people have unrealistic goals. So let me just be honest. I have a big show, right? It might cost me $5,000 to put out an episode at this point, just with all the video editing, my team, the photo shoots, and the makeup and lights, equipment, whatever it is, just the whole thing. The value of it is way more than $5,000, but let’s say my costs are $5,000. When somebody asks to be on my show, sometimes they don’t have a book, a following, or a perspective, and they don’t have a good angle. But they’re like, ”Oh, I have this new company and I have this great mission,” and they think that’s enough.
But it isn’t. Have you heard the mission of my show? Do you know my mission? It’s difficult because you don’t want to reject people, but then you also have to think about your listener. So at the end of the day, my customers are my listeners, and they need to get value. So if I can’t get the value out of you, I don’t care if you’re famous. I interviewed sleep scientists who have no social media following, but they spent 50 years learning how to talk about sleep and know everything about it. And I want to get that information out to my listeners, right?
You can build up your résumé a bit. You need to earn it. I recommend finding people who are at your level or slightly above to collaborate with and seeing where the up-and- coming podcasters are that you can get your feet wet on, where or how you can start to build your buzz until you reach the top podcast.
And what is your long-form content? I think that is the key. A lot of people try to come on these podcasts with no long-form content. Without long-form content, you don’t have a perspective. And if you don’t have a perspective, there’s nothing to talk about. It needs to be substantial with your own unique thoughts.
Mary:
I always say the goal is to build your currency, whether it’s your social currency, or just even if you want to get on podcasts. Always start at the tier 2- or tier 3-level podcasts because they are a lot easier to get on. And then it’s so much easier to be able to present 30 podcasts that you’ve been on, and some testimonials about your style of interviewing. It just gives the host confidence that you know how to talk. Second, you’ve got some type of specialization, and third, other people really like having you on their show.
Hala:
That’s great advice. I really think the key is getting asked to be on a podcast rather than asking to be on one. And you do that by showing up to the world and being an expert in your field. Then the podcast inquiries are going to come.
I didn’t really start getting asked to be on podcasts until I positioned myself as a podcast expert, as a marketing expert.
Mary:
You’re absolutely right. I love listening to audible content. I can maximize my time. For example, when I drop my kids to and from school, I have a 20-minute window to either listen to an audible book or a podcast. This is so powerful when you think about it because it’s captured attention. I never thought of it like that, but somebody could actually speak to me in a podcast for 40 minutes with awesome content including the advertising. That’s powerful when it comes to targeting people, and while you have their attention, do you think that advertisers will start to realize this as an opportunity to advertise on podcasts or even start their own podcast?
Hala:
Oh, my gosh, podcast ads are not a new thing. Brands are flocking to podcasts, and the opportunities are growing incredibly for podcasting right now. Also, monetizing through sponsorships for brands and podcasters is huge right now. And it’s just growing exponentially. I mean, I see it now, my podcasts in the last year, we’ve been sponsored by Ole Fiber, Talkspace, ZipRecruiter, even Gusto. You just have to grow your following to a certain point, and then the brands will be interested. So there are lots of opportunities there, lots of businesses flourishing that are selling podcast ads, lots of innovation. Another new and innovative way that we didn’t really talk about for monetizing podcasts is that a lot of apps are asking people to sell their podcasts’ content, like micro content versions of their podcasts. So for example, I just signed with Blinkist, and they have a new shortcast program. We’re submitting eight-minute episodes from our old inventory and reselling them to Blinkist. And then they’re going to play shortcasts on that app.
Mary:
It is innovative when you really think about it. I think that one thing that this pandemic has provided us if we’re open to it is an opportunity in the digital landscape, whether it be starting a digital business, an online service, or a podcast; there is so much scope in the digital landscape. And as you rightly said, it’s so innovative and it continues to be innovative. There’s no shortage of it.
Hala:
It’s really super exciting. I’m starting a network, which is very exciting for me just learning how to use enterprise hosting and figuring out dynamic ad insertion. And there’s this whole part of podcasting that is really for advanced podcasters like Joe Rogan’s podcasters. Now there are podcast reads, where a host reads a podcast ad on new episodes. But after about 30 or 60 days for your old episodes, you can replace the commercials with prerecorded commercials. So like a Ford commercial could play and you can monetize your old and new stuff. The commercials always get swapped out. It’s a way to make passive income if you grow your show big enough.
When I first started podcasting, I used to think that you can’t really monetize a podcast. It should just be a lead-generation tool. It’s really hard to monetize. It’s practically impossible. And I always thought you couldn’t make that much
money, but now? Oh my gosh, I was so wrong. You can make a lot of money. And, it’s just super exciting to continue to grow these shows and figure out how to monetize them.
Mary:
I think a lot of people will get concerned on the benchmark of the size of the audience. But my view is that you shouldn’t be focused on reaching everybody. You should be focused on a niche. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a hundred or a million, but if those people are dedicated and interested in your subject matter, they will follow you. What’s your view on that? Is there a benchmark that we should be following?
Hala:
I think it depends on your goals. If your way of leveraging your podcast is growing your network through the guests that you bring on, it doesn’t matter how many listeners you have, right? If your goal is to make ads from sponsorships, you need downloads. If your goal is to promote your products and services, maybe you can do well if it’s a high-ticket offer to a niche audience, but if it’s a low-ticket offer, you probably need a broader audience to make a living out of your show. It really depends on your goals. And based on your goals, you can decide where you want to spend your time. Is it on promotion to increase your downloads? Is it on the content itself to try to convince the small group of people to buy this high-ticket offer?
Mary:
What about equipment? Let’s just quickly touch on that. What equipment do I need to start a podcast? So just give us the top must-haves and the nice-to-haves.
Hala:
You can do your podcast remotely and especially in COVID times, you could do it just with your computer. So a laptop and a USB mic, which range anywhere from $80 to $400. They have an Audio-Technica.
That’s about $80, which is nice. Mine is like maybe $400. And a USB mic will just plug right into your computer. You need wired headphones. I would suggest that you always wear headphones, and you should always recommend that your guests wear headphones. I just use regular old Apple ones. So wired headphones, USB mic, laptop, a webcam. I have a webcam plugged in, which makes so much of a difference for maybe $80.
That’s the minimum hardware. Now in terms of software, you need a hosting provider, like Podbean, (podbean.com/yap). It’s $9 a month. Then there’s a recording platform, like Riverside.fm. It’s the same cost of Zoom, but it’s HD video/HD audio and it’s made for podcasters; that’s $25 a month. So overall that’s less than $1,000 and probably less than $50 a month to run your show.
Mary:
Well, it’s like any business: If you’re serious about it, you have to invest in it. There are no shortcuts. You either do it right or you don’t. You can always upgrade, but you need a decent setup to actually get decent audio at the very least, something that’s really important on a podcast. So can you just give us a little bit of context of your company, what it is that you do, who you work with, and what you offer just for the listeners and the people that are reading the magazine? If they’re interested in engaging you, what specifically does your company do?
Hala:
We have a full-service marketing and podcast production agency. We handle social media management, and we’re very white-glove service. A lot of our clients are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies or big companies, and they just want to have us run the show. They just show up to their podcast recording. And we take over entire personal brands, so it’s not just about the podcast. It’s about your book, your course, your business. We talk about all the priorities in your business, not just your podcast.
That’s just one element and something that we specialize in. We handle LinkedIn management, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, and then we do end-to- end podcast management such as guest booking logistics, show notes, scripting questions, audio editing, uploading to the hosting provider, creating the micro content, and integrating it into the social schedules. We publish; we do common engagement. We help boost the posts to make sure that they perform well. So we are really a full suite and super white-glove company. It’s not like you’re getting an email package. We’re doing all the work. And, I have a massive team now, 63 team members, 12 major clients.
Mary:
That’s so wonderful. I’m really pleased for you. We’ve come to the end of the interview now. And I always ask my guests one last question, and that is this: If you could meet someone who is no longer living, who would it be and what would you ask them? Or what would you want to know?
Hala:
I would talk to my father. My father passed away last May, and I would basically want to tell my dad that I started a company because he passed away. I started my company when he was in the hospital, and he had COVID, and he ended up passing away.
Mary:
Oh my God, that’s so gorgeous. At the end of the show, I get goosebumps because it always ends like this. I’m just so grateful that you were open to being vulnerable and shared that vulnerability with us. That’s just gorgeous because you’re a beautiful human, Hala. I can assure you that your dad is looking over you and saying, ”That’s my girl. ” You are an amazing person. You’re a force to be reckoned with. Honestly, you are all over social media; you’re doing an amazing job. Your podcast is gorgeous. And what you bring to the world is just unbelievable. So it’s been an honor, an absolute honor, to have you on Authoritti5.0. And I just want to say thank you for your time.
Hala:
Thank you so much, Mary. I appreciate you.